Skyforge: Revealing the Divine Observatory

In addition to the exciting announcements below, Eric DeMilt, Development Director of Culturalization for Skyforge, will be doing a LIVE Q&A session in the comments from 12-2pm CDT 7/2/2014

It's time to continue the journey through the world of Skyforge! Today we are revealing one of the most significant features of this game, the Divine Observatory. For the residents of Aelion, the Divine Observatory is a global surveillance and warning system. Its task is to monitor and display the pleas for help of Aelion's mortals and send immortals to their aid. For players, it is a single point of entry into all sorts of adventures!

The Divine Observatory, as well as special Access points located throughout the whole planet, will quickly take you to where your help is needed most.

When you first begin your journey from immortal to godhood only a few adventures will be open but more and more will become available to you as you progress. During the first hundred hours of play time, the immortal heroes of Aelion will participate in more than 40 exciting solo and group PvE adventures. There are also five different types of PvP competitions for PvP fans and ten vast open world locations that can be explored for hours and hours.

There are a multitude of activities open to players in the Divine Observatory, and your choice is not limited in any way. It’s up to you to decide whether you would like to develop your character for PvP or PvE and then quickly jump into the content you prefer.

A normal adventure can be completed in an average of 15-25 minutes, while open world locations can take hours and hours to explore.

The Divine Observatory is updated every 40 minutes. Any changes in the adventures open to you or their rewards will be immediately displayed on the globe, a miniature projection of the planet. The system updates the list of “hot spots”, allowing players to easily see and participate in all currently active events.

You are free to replay specific individual and group PvE-missions you enjoy again and again, and their rewards grow as your prestige grows, so they remain useful to your development and progression. After repeating an adventure several times, the difficulty will increase, and so will the amount and value of the rewards. Of course, other types of content also remain relevant to you as you grow as well. For example, the matchmaking system always tries to find the most suitable opponents when it picks players for PvP battles.

Open adventures and their rewards are updated every 40 minutes.

There are also additional recommended events which will appear in the Divine Observatory from time-to-time (adventure of the day, week and month). These recommended events are a great way to test your characters progression or try a different class. Sometimes the reward for the recommended event is so high that even an avid PvP player may decide to participate in a PvE adventure, or a confirmed Paladin will set off for Factory 501 as a Cryomancer.

The number you see in this picture above is Prestige - the main indicator of character development. It is affected by new unlocked classes, abilities, talents, equipment upgrades and many other things. When you reach a certain amount, new adventure and content are automatically unlocked.

Over time, there will be an abundance of adventures and content available to you.

As heroes complete PvE-and PvP-adventures, they receive rewards including; Credits, the most common money on Aelion. Gems of Insight, which are used to develop your characters skills and talents, unlocking new classes and characteristics, and Exotic Currencies, which can be used to buy new outfits, customizing the look of your character.

As your prestige grows, the list of rewards expands. While at first characters receive only Gems of Insight, later their adventures will yield other, more valuable resources. Over time, more and more difficult tasks will become available to you, including massive guild activities with their own rules and prizes, but that’s a topic for another day.

Let us know what you think of the Divine Observatory and remember to leave any questions in the comments below! If you want the chance to see if it for yourself make sure you sign up for the Skyforge Beta now! Our Skyforge Wiki is still in the process of growing and we're always looking for more contributors. If you’re looking for a place to start getting into editing, you can check out our Help Page or the more general Gamepedia Help Wiki. If you want some personal help with something, you can always visit us in the #Gamepedia channel on IRC.

Hi! At the moment I am currently playing more MOBA type games. However, skyforge looks crazy interesting and I'm definitely looking to try it out! What aspects of the game do you think could attract other MOBA gamers into playing skyforge?

Thank you for your thoughtful questions! We'd also like to thank Eric for sparing us some time to provide feedback on these points. Be sure to stay tuned to Gamepedia for more Official Skyforge announcements!

Hello, just wanted to pop up and say that the game looks awesome so far, not only visually but feature-wise as well!

I also wanted to ask a couple of questiions related to the group mechanics - we already know that Skyforge has abandoned the standard trinity party system and replaces it with tank/dps/support trinity, which is somewhat similar at first glance but when looked into it can be very different. So the first question arises - is it mandatory to have that kind of group structure to finish group content through the game or can we go as a group of tanks or group of only supports and expect to finish the mission successfully? Also is one class limited to one particular role or can we expect DPS and supporting paladins, tanking gunners, etc?

It is not mandatory to have a balanced group structure. Some content may be easier or more challenging depending on your group composition but we want players to be able to play the way they want to play. If your Thursday Night Group all want to play Berserkers, go for it. You may be missing a support ability like a Battle rez, but that doesn't mean you aren't viable and cannot complete content.

Although classes will typically have a primary role, which matches what you'd expect from it's archetype, all are viable in combat as well as their primary role. In addition, the Ascension Atlas gives you tremendous freedom in how you develop your character and classes to support your play style and allows you to accentuate your strengths and minimize your weaknesses. So if you like playing a gunner, and want to invest in skills that make you a better tank you can. This doesn't mean you'll necessarily be as strong a tank as a "tanking" class, but you can develop yourself in that direction.

Is there any sort of kicker reward or heightened visibility for queues that have been enqueue for a while (more than 2 minutes) and if so do these rewards increase the longer the queue is active (say at 2 minute intervals up to 5 times, maxing out at 10 minutes)?

Or are there other designs in place to accomplish that goal of expediting queues?

Good question. Our main design to expedite queues comes from our server architecture. Having one server per geographic territory supporting all players helps us ensure robust and fast matchmaking. The player population for a given game event or type is not subdivided or restricted by "realm" so we are able to put you together with everyone in your region of the world, looking to play that type of content at any given time.

Don't get me wrong, that is an absolutely fantastic first step, but after having played games with similar server archtecture I would say there needs to be a second and maybe a third step to provide visibility and rewards to players that have been enqueue for a long time. I'd rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it.

Streaming is interesting tech but to meet our goals of visual quality and responsive game play we are focused on delivering the game experience via a traditional PC client and sever model.

At launch Skyforge will focus on the players battles to protect their home world of Aelion from invading gods and their armies. These gods and armies come from other worlds in the Skyforge universe. Initially players will fight to drive them back. Taking the fight to them and exploring new worlds is something we'd might explore in future content updates.

We've not announced any beta dates yet, but sign up for beta, and stay tuned to our news and social channels to hear when we do announce kick off dates for beta and launch activities.

Currently Russia is the lead territory for the game but we have not yet announced our final plans for launch and patch schedules.

Thanks for the art book suggestion. Our team loves to her the community asking for stuff like this!

1 : the streaming thing is one of these things that you'd have but rather not need. It makes the accessibility of the game unparalleled as all you would need is a good internet connection and a potato to play it on. As far as the latency, I would urge you to meet with the parties that provide those services and hear the pitch. I am fairly certain that there is a service out there that could meet your goals if not exceed them. The big question is what is the cost and what is the benefit to you as a company. For the consumer the benefits are pretty clear, in that I'd be buying a terminal box instead of a $1200 computer, which would free up a lot of money that I could spend bag space and looking awesome.

2: Good answer

3: i did and have been checking back daily.

4: about what would be expected, hope the lead time on patches is minimal.

Guilds will have size caps, and systems for raising those caps as your guild grows. We are still working on figuring out exactly what those numbers should be.

We have numbers for quild caps that we are looking at internally. We'll be talking about guilds in more detail down the road, and look forward to getting input on what you think of our ideas when we roll them out.

I just want to know if it will be Pay to Win. I am supporting this game very much and would like at least a little reassurance that the "cash shop" will NOT contain Pay To Win items. When I enjoy a game I spend a lot of money, like I did with Neverwinter. Pay To Win would just ruin it for us gamer's.

We haven't announced any details about our business model including luck boxes or other items which modify PvP, but feedback like this, from the community, is very important to us and will help us make the game better.

I wish I could promise you a game where you would never have to replay any content, but I'm afraid I can't go that far. What I can say is that we are working very hard to create a game that does not lock you into grinding out a specific area or type of content before you can progress. The Divine Observatory is an example of one of our steps in this direction. Being able to see all the content open to you, and the rewards for completion, give you the ability to pick what you want to do and to find alternate paths to the the same goal.

In addition we are taking steps to make replaying content less of a grind and to provide varied rewards and difficulty to make these experiences more fun.

At launch, humans will be the only playable race. I think you'll like what we do with the "god forms" though. We'll go into detail on those at a later date.